In an attempt to address the debate among social science scholars regarding whether or not online political engagement is a legitimate form of political participation, this study investigates the conditions under which migrants engage politically with virtual communities, and when and how online participation spills over to real-world social mobilization. The case study of Kyrgyz migrants’ online activism in virtual social media groups and pages on Facebook and its Russian equivalents VKontakte and Odnoklassniki demonstrates that, although migrants are not likely to routinely participate in, initiate, or continuously engage with political conversations on these platforms, crisis conditions, such as the October revolution in 2020, the first COVID wave the summer of that same year, and the Kyrgyz–Tajik border conflict in April–May 2021, trigger bursts of political activism on social media which carry over to the real-world in the form of fundraising and protest mobilization.
Despite its global rise, theoretical frameworks to capture populism have been derived primarily from case studies in the Western hemisphere. To assess if and how the premises of populism travel across different contexts, we offer a comparative analysis of populist discourses in Turkey, India, and Russia, countries with different political contexts and religions. The content analysis of 1682 speeches of Erdoğan, Modi, and Putin shows that they depart from their European and American counterparts because they are neither nativist nor inclusive. Instead, they introduce a new notion of “people” anchored in a religiously defined community, interpret the nation’s past to achieve their own political goals, and identify different driving forces to restore their lost global role. A comparison of Erdoğan, Modi, and Putin highlights the blind spots of existing studies, which fail to carefully contextualize the term, thus obscuring the country-specific constituents of populist discourses and the role of religions. Understanding the regional variants of populism not only helps us capture the reasons behind the leaders’ appeal and resiliency but also their so-called unexpected actions and decisions, such as Putin’s territorial and religious claims over Ukraine.
Populist mobilization may take different forms. It can be either revolutionary, through social movements, or electoral, through political parties, but is often a mixture of both under the leadership of a populist persona. The October Revolution in Kyrgyzstan provides an opportunity to look beyond classical cases of populist mobilization in Europe and the Americas to uncover key factors that cause existing populist attitudes to become activated and mobilized. Political science literature points to the root causes of populist uprisings as coming from either the supply-side perspective, meaning populist rhetoric and institutional conditions that induce the appearance of populist parties, or the demand-side perspective, meaning individual attitudes that predict support for populists. These theories of populism may do well at explaining American or European varieties of populist mobilization, but they fail to capture Kyrgyzstan’s experience. Thus, drawing on ideational theory that emphasizes the interplay between populist attitudes, elite rhetoric, and contextual factors, this study employs World Values Survey (WVS) data from 2003, 2011, and 2020—three pivotal pre-revolutionary or post-revolutionary periods. This allows for the investigation of not only the changes in attitudes but also crucial contextual factors that determined the outcome of the October Revolution. The findings show that, on the demand-side, populist ideas have always been widespread, but required specific material conditions, including explosive corruption scandals and the COVID-19 crisis, and populist cues from the supply-side to become activated.
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